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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Gartner 2012: Technology Trends for Today and Tomorrow

Last week, I wrote about Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies, but many other sessions at the company's Symposium dealt with technology trends as well. Topics ranged from the current critical trends and technologies that enterprise technology people need to worry about today to the ones that are on the "radar screen" for the rest of the decade.

Many of these trends are not new and have been discussed a lot, such as the need for bigger data, changing client and server architectures, cloud services, and the Internet of things. Others are emerging technologies such as software networks and virtual data centers.

I was particularly interested in Cappuccio's thought that "hybrid data centers" will be in our future. He said that companies should keep critical applications—maybe 10 or 15 percent of its applications—within their own data centers, but that other applications should not. He noted that this model is old, with ADP proving it could do payroll processing more efficiently decades ago, then it became a standard. "We didn't call it outsourcing or cloud," he said, "we just called it a service."

He also said we were entering an era where one size doesn't fit all and one OS doesn't fit all, so IT leaders will have to deal with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and mobile strategies. The days of a monolithic office suite are over because it doesn't make sense to put the same image on a tablet as on a desktop, he explained. Organizations can try to force standardization, which doesn’t work, or open things up.

I hadn't heard people talk about "appliance madness" before, but I can see where there is a huge proliferation of easy-to-deploy hardware appliances or virtual machines that effectively are software and services packaged up to address specific workloads. Dealing with the sheer number of these appliances adds to complexity, he said.

And indeed, increasing complexity seems to be the outcome of most of these trends. Cappuccio quoted something call "Glass' Law," which says that for every 25 percent increase in the functionality of a system, there is a 100 percent increase in the complexity. He noted how the increasing number of settings in everything from software to switches ends up with a huge "combinatorial complexity" for the whole environment.

This increased complexity will lead to a need for cross-function skills, in addition to specific skills in individual technologies, particularly as we move toward a "virtual data center."

No matter what happens, Cappuccio said, the demand for IT will continue to increase, with servers growing at a 10 percent average annual growth rate, network bandwidth growing at 35 percent, storage capacity at 50 percent, and power costs at 20 percent.

He showed Gartner's annual "hype cycle" for emerging technologies, which points out which technologies are beginning to emerge, which have inflated expectations, and which are now facing disillusionment because of such expectations.

But he mostly focused on what he called a "radar screen" of broader themes that will create bigger issues between 2014 and 2020.

"It's not about individual technologies," Prentice said. He said individual technologies are important, but what is more important is what the technology does, what it means to people, and what it enables.

The big trends he pointed out were:

Linking the Physical and Digital Worlds: This is involves using the "Internet of things," he said, pointing to things from the hobbyist level like Arduino to larger devices aimed at bigger business. He talked about a Welsh city that is putting QR codes on just about everything in the city.

Human System Interaction: In the future, Prentice said, it will no longer be "about the device." He said once you lose the tyranny of the form factor, people will have all sorts of different connected devices, from wearable computing to Google Glass.

This will impact more than just mobile phones. In all sorts of devices, we'll see different kinds of interaction, such as touch and gesture interfaces. Touch is nice, he said, but when you touch something, you obscure it, and that brings up issues with using touch in health care because of worries about spreading germs.

Human Augmentation and Robotics:Prentice talked about a wide variety of robotics covering everything from industrial robotics to autonomous vehicles, or as he called it "from Robovac to Transhuman." He noted the fast improvements in these areas. For instance, in a DARPA challenge five years ago, no automated vehicles could travel more than 17 miles in the desert; now, three states have licensed autonomous vehicles for use on the highway. Such cars have covered 150,000 miles with only one accident, when the vehicle was rear-ended by a car driven by a human.

Digital Business Innovation: Digital business is both accelerating and undermining traditional business models, Prentice said. This covers a wide spectrum, starting with business models we've seen emerging over the past few years. We have "freemium," where most customers get the product for free, but with a few customers paying for higher-end services; and the micro-pricing model used in app stores and in-app purchase.

In the future, there will be different kinds of business, including 3D printing (which Prentice said was just another word for fabrication), and using more than just plastic. He noted that car companies are using special alloys and jewelry makers are using metals to produce things (such as hollow items) you can't do in traditional manufacturing. This lets you create things that are "just for me," he said. Continuum, a clothing maker in London, lets you create unique clothing and using a 3D scanner, you can get garments made that perfectly fit you.

Fundamentally, he said, this undermines traditional manufacturing. For centuries, the more devices you make, the less expensive it is to make. But with 3D printing, every item can be unique and the cost of the hundredth item is the same as the first. This has implications for logistics, military use, and others.

New Societal Drivers for Business: It's not just business models that are changing, Prentice said, but also changes in society are changing business. He talked about religious movements (like Sharia banking) to financial changes (creating programs such as Kickstarter and micro-lending) and distribution changes (creating markets such as eBay and Etsy). Driving all of these, he said, is the evolution of "emotional ecosystems," which succeed in part because they make people feel better.

Infinite Information: This was Prentice's term for what has often been called "Big Data," and what he said is "probably the biggest immediate IT challenge."

The most important thing here, he said, is the need to turn data into information that can be acted upon. "I don't think there's any value in data," he said. "You don't get value out of big data unless or until somebody makes a decision based on it." He noted that different kinds of information have different shelf lives—some information is very perishable, while others have a very long life.

Within this, he was particularly enthusiastic about in-memory database and computing. The price of memory has dropped dramatically; 1GB of flash memory cost nearly $8,000 in 1997 but only 25 cents today. He said this will change the kind of things we do, allowing for in-memory databases, columnar databases, noSQL databases, and many systems that mix various kinds of data.

The Evolution of the Internet: On one hand, people want governments to control parts of the Internet and protect us from bad things; on the other hand, Prentice said, we all want freedom. This is complicated by others with a drive for profit. This results in the three forces in tension and you end up with "different Internets" in different markets, with different rules, but all interconnected.

The Talent Crunch: Finally, he talked about the many baby boomers who will be retiring over the next few years and how it is difficult to find replacements. He described software and robots as "new options for the workforce."

Overall, it is important for technology professionals to establish a process that gives us a 360-degree view of what lies ahead, he said.

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